ISSUE 25: February 2023

03 Campaign news

06 Global news

08 The problem with monopoly capitalism

11 Global Justice Now supporters

12 Digital colonisation

14 What big oil owes the world

16 Posters of the Mozambican Revolution

19 Reviews

Challenging the excessive power of corporations has always been central to Global Justice Now. In fact, the history of the modern corporation goes back several hundred years, its origins associated with the plunder and brutality of empire. Today, in the age of the modern global economy, ever more powerful corporations have again become the central vehicle for extraction and exploitation.

Ninety-Nine is published three times a year by Global Justice Now

Global Justice Now campaigns for a world where resources are controlled by the many, not the few. We champion social movements and propose democratic alternatives to the rule of the 1%. Our activists and groups in towns and cities around the UK work in solidarity with those at the sharp end of poverty and injustice.

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Editor: Jonathan Stevenson

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Cover image: Daisy Pearson

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Of course, there’s a particular problem when corporations are allowed to control the basics we all need to live a dignified life – products like food and medicines – as Niall Glynn explains on page 8. There’s a problem when corporations are able to knowingly pollute the planet and destroy the environment, leaving others to pay for the cost of these actions in their lives and livelihoods, as Daniel Willis writes on page 14. And there’s a problem when corporations can monopolise technologies central to public debate and discussion, to our working and social lives, as Parminder Jeet Singh explains on page 12.

But this isn’t simply a problem of a small handful of big businesses behaving badly in specific sectors. Corporate power now defines our economic model, strengthened and protected by the rules of the global economy. Under such a regime, really extreme inequality is not a side note, it’s integral to how the economy works. And it poses more general threats to our democratic rights too. As US anti-monopoly campaigner Zephyr Teachout says, when private interests are allowed to use public power for their own private and selfish ends, this doesn’t simply encourage corruption, it is corruption.

We believe such an economy can accurately be described as monopoly capitalism. We hope that this label can help mobilise people from across society not only in the important but specific battles against ‘big pharma’ or ‘big agriculture’, in which we’ve been engaged in for many years, but in challenging an economic model which encourages corporate power. Only then, can we build a more equal, democratic and sustainable society.